An Olympic Obsession: The Olympics brings people together in different but equally meaningful ways

When you think of the Winter Olympics you may imagine people in glittery outfits dancing for their lives on the ice or a potential gold-medalist skier flipping through the air, praying they stick the landing. Maybe it’s sitting around a TV with your family or watching intently on your phone past your bedtime on a school night. 

The Olympics can touch the hearts of many, in different but equally meaningful ways.

For 2021 East alum Liv Olson, it conjures up images of visits to the Salt Lake City Olympic sites as a kid. Being from Utah, she holds a special connection to the Olympics.

“Sometimes when we [go back] to Utah, we check out the sites and stuff where they held the Olympics, and they have like a cool Museum in Park City,” Olson said. “I remember going with my family, which also kind of makes them more special.”

Olson’s grandparents still live in the Salt Lake area and in 2012, her family, except her dad, stayed with them. Returning home from the two-and-a-half-month-long stay in Utah and seeing her father after that long was a relief for Olson.

The family celebrated their return by watching the summer Olympics.

“Back then, we had like this little TV,” Olson said. “It was like a box TV, a-foot-by-a-foot screen. We were all watching [the Olympics] around it. And it’s just fun as little kids because we didn’t really get what was going on. But I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Go Team USA!’”

This year for the Olympics, she’s away from home while in Brigham Young for college, but it’s still helped her bond with her family from afar. She talks to her mom multiple times a day and Olympics are never left out of the discussion.

Olson and her mother are definitely the most intense in her family when it comes to the Olympics — their deafening cheering during the luge events makes their family red with embarrassment. However, her siblings have their Olympic-fan-girl-moments. Her little brother went far enough to make a presentation explaining the rules of wrestling for her mother, who didn’t quite understand them when watching the Summer Olympics in 2021.

In a similar fashion, freshman Gracie Bergin enjoys the excitement of the Olympics with her overly-competitive parents — which runs in the family. The Olympic spirit comes to fruition in the form of friendly competitions.

Bergin has suffered the wrath of her gloating parents — once doing the dishes for a month was the consequence of her picking wrong for who would take the gold in a men’s swimming event in 2016.

“I think my whole family is very competitive,” Bergin said. “So I think that sometimes we can get pretty intense, but we won’t ever actually get angry at each other about it.”

Beyond the family aspect of competition, Bergin enjoys the patriotism that comes with the Olympics for U.S. viewers.

“Knowing that I’m from that country… I just think it’s so cool,” Bergin said.

On the flip side, sophomore Griffin King prefers his Olympic experience to be completely private. He hasn’t watched the Olympics with another person in years. But that doesn’t mean that he won’t spend his entire lunch period discussing the results from the luge.

He carves whatever time he can out of his schedule to accommodate for the Olympics, even if that means neglecting his duties while working at Taco Republic or staying up to an unreasonable hour to see highlights of the day’s performances.

However, King has an uncommon perspective on the Olympics — one with historical ties.

“Obviously the Olympics started like 1,000 years ago,” King said. “And the naked Romans wanted to fight each other. 1,000 years later, [the Olympics are] spread across the world. And we can see the same sports that they competed in then, now, but on a much more worldwide scale. So I think there’s something very pleasing to me about that kind of primal level of just wanting a game to play, to play sports with your fellow Roman.”

King views the 2022 Olympics as a “war inside of China,” where the athletes from their home countries all come together to compete for dominance. The idea of war rather than sport is the motivation behind his interest.

“When the Olympics comes on, it’s kind of the sort of thing where you just get to really see humans — Romans — pushing themselves to just the brink of their abilities, and it’s kind of interesting to see that peak of human possibility,” said King.

Whether it be through the common patriotism felt by the American people, the close-knit bond of a family or an interest in human competition, the Olympic spirit is alive at East.